They did more. The grand-tactical mission failed, and we couldn't keep Ho Chi Minh from enslaving South Viet Nam, but our guys achieved a strategic result.
The CIA spurred the Indonesian colonels to get rid of the bugbear Sukarno, who was a stalking-horse for the Communist PKI, and they fell on the PKI itself and slaughtered them in the hundreds of thousands, 800,000 of them by one count, so that the Andaman Sea and the Java Sea were full of floating corpses for two years.
As for the Vietnamese Communists, our guys destroyed the Viet Cong in two great campaigns in 1968, even as the KGB and the New Left plotted to overthrow the Democratic Party from within, and then our people went on to kill over a million other Communist cadre in the field in the big battles and air campaigns of 1967-73.
The NVA cadre we killed, and the tanks they were riding when SAC arclighted them and piled their T-54's on top of each other like Tootsie Toys, were the ones Ho was counting on to lead his thugs to Singapore and break a blood-red flag over the Malacca Strait, one of the world's great maritime highways.
The Sino-Soviet grand campaign to cut the East in two and deprive Japan of her energy supplies, failed thanks to the sacrifices of American soldiers, Marines, and airmen, and the efforts, however uneven, of the ARVN, the Mikes, the Hmong and Montagnards and the rest of the people who fought with the good guys in the Lost Armies of Indochina.
Greetings, LG. Placemarking! Fascinating history lesson.
That is an excellent analysis I have never heard, and well written.
What a region of the world filled with bloodshed for the better part of two decades, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia.
Thanks for posting that.